AlphaFold is five years old - these charts show how it revolutionized science

"Five years ago, in late November 2020, researchers at London-based Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold2. The artificial intelligence tool for predicting protein structures generated stunningly accurate 3D models that, in some cases, were indistinguishable from experimental maps, dominating a long-running structure-prediction challenge. The first version of AlphaFold was announced in 2018, but its predictions weren't nearly as good as its successor, which limited its impact."

"The 2021 release of AlphaFold2's code and a database that has swelled to hundreds of millions of predicted structures mean that scientists can now get a reliable prediction for almost any protein. "Having models for anything has had a huge impact," says Janet Thornton, a bioinformatician at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI). "It's like the second coming of structural biology.""

"For Pauli's team, the software shone a light on a path they might otherwise never have found. The model predicted that a protein, called Tmem81, stabilizes a complex of two other sperm proteins, creating a pocket for Bouncer to bind to. Experiments backed up the tool's predictions. AlphaFold "speeds up discovery", says Pauli. "We use it for every project." Her team's paper about this, published in 2024, is one of nearly 40,000 journal articles to cite the 2021 Nature paper describing AlphaFold2."

AlphaFold2, unveiled in late 2020, produced highly accurate three-dimensional protein models, in some cases indistinguishable from experimental maps. The first AlphaFold release in 2018 was less accurate and had limited impact. The 2021 release of AlphaFold2's code and a growing database of hundreds of millions of predicted structures provide reliable predictions for almost any protein. The tool enabled identification of Tmem81 as a stabilizer of a sperm-protein complex that forms a pocket for the egg protein Bouncer, and experimental work validated those predictions. AlphaFold2's models have accelerated discoveries across structural biology and appear in nearly 40,000 citations.

Read at Nature